Should I buy a plugin or hire someone to code when looking to integrate ACH payments?

Checkout is a high-quality WordPress theme by Array built for marketplaces of any kind. https://arraythemes.com/themes/checkout-wordpress-theme/ Let me know if you have any questions about implementation, and I'd be happy to setup a call.

Shopify is best use case for $0 to $1M ish, depending on product line, how many transactions that makes up, and if their are some custom things that are not possible on Shopify that realistically lead to huge gains that would cover more costs of a custom solution with something like magento. I recommend Shopify to everyone starting out. That's what we used at Diamond Candles up until about a $5M run rate. We were/are growing quickly so we hit a point where payoff of customizing checkout flow, add of social sign on, etc. that could not be done because of Shopify, would cover and surpass costs of a more custom option. Best to think about this simplistic example. View the ecom platform market in about 3 buckets. 1. Starting out: $0-$1M ish 2. Wow looks like you have a business: $1M-$20 or 50ish 3. You are/could be publicly traded: $50M+ Take a look at usage #'s for market share size from independent third party analytics tools from Builtwith: http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Shopify/Market-Share http://trends.builtwith.com/shop http://trends.builtwith.com/shop/hosted-solution Just because something is found on the web more isn't the full picture. Ie. I could make a blogging platform and have a bunch of scripts and bots install it on millions of domains and I would have majority of the market for blogging platforms (ya that would take a while and isn't a realistic scenario but you can get the point). Providers dominating the different categories by companies in those areas actually doing volume and being succsessful? 1. Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento GO, 2. Magento (varying editions), Yahoo Stores, Symphony Commerce 3. Demand Ware, GSI Commerce, Magento (varying editions) At the end of the day a good illustration goes like this. A truck and a moped are two different things. A truck is not trying to out 'moped' a moped and a moped not trying to out 'truck' a truck. They are both perfectly suited to different applications, situations, needs, and circumstances. The same goes with who you choose to handle your ecom platform. For 2-3 search for internet retailers first 500 and second 500 lists. Pull off all ecommerce companies doing between $10-$50M as an example. Use the builtwith.com chrome toolbar to tell you what platform they are using. Hire someone for $2 an hour via odesk to make a spreadsheet of everything and the make a pretty little pie chart. Now you know what each revenue volume level chooses as 1, 2, 3 preferred platforms. Option 3 as a side note but very important one, is primarily a platform and commerce as a service model with companies like Demand Ware and GSI Commerce leading the market with platform and services including but not limited to customer service for the brand, fulfillment, marketing services, website product photography etc. Their pricing models are based on gross revenue share. ie. SportsAuthority.com does $100M online this year, GSI takes 30% of that to cover everything. (I am not sure who Sports Authority uses, just an example) You can almost pick any traditional brick and mortar retailer and if they have a website where they sell things, they all do, GSI or DW are the people behind the scenes running the call centers, shipping etc. Diamond Candles, my company, who started on Shopify decided to not go with a the market dominating option of Magento for a few reasons. One of which being upfront cost for an agency or on staff magento CTO type. We decided to partner with a newer entrant, Symphony Commerce, which blends the 3rd category model of platform plus service. Rev. cut is significantly smaller than providers in category 3, but still get benefits of volume savings on shipping volume, scalable customer support that can handle rapid growth and occasional spikes without us having to worry about scaling or implementing best practices, and a fully customizable platform as a service so to speak that doesn't require us to have in house tech but where we are essentially renting part time ecommerce engineers from with resumes that list Google, FB, Twitter, Magento, Amazon, etc. So in summary. If you are <$1M in revenue just roll with Shopify. Greater than that but less than $50M ish then I would recommend looking into Symphony. If Symphony is interested in letting you in then you won't have to incur the upfront costs of an agency or implementation and you will have an ongoing partner equally incentivized i your long term success financially which I prefer as opposed to an agency model which economically is incentivized to offer a one time finished product and their revenue is not tied to my financial success. It is the closest thing to an equity partner while returning our full equity.

Be careful when simply wrapping things into a mobile app. This can backfire on you and you could be presented with some very harsh edge cases. PHP isn't going to be encapsulated so much as the HTML/CSS/JavaScript. So keep in mind your mobile application could likely be in a position of requiring an online connection to work (because it must interface with your existing hosted WordPress site). This could also mean your hosting solution needs to be evaluated to ensure you can handle any increased traffic (and those traffic patterns could be different when coming from a mobile app that perhaps loads things the user doesn't see right away, accesses content that may not be cached, etc.). You want to ensure your server doesn't go down because then your mobile app would be "down" as well. That said... Things like Phonegap (web views) are a wonderful idea for utility apps because the performance is good enough for those (and hey even some games) and they end up being easily ported across many mobile operating systems. I would look into Phonegap, Appgyver (a new and totally awesome one because parts of it will utilize the native OS and your app will feel more responsive), Appcelerator Titanium, and perhaps even the new Famo.us one. Also take a look at the Ionic Framework for some further ideas about mobile UI and what you can do with these web view style apps.

Well first off I wouldn't recommend trying to power your client's database with the standard WordPress database instance. They can use WordPress for the website all they like. But with millions of records like that, you really don't want to move those data in with WordPress. For that matter, you're probably gonna want a dedicated database server to answer those questions, if the client doesn't already have one. You might also need to investigate something like Elastic Search, depending on what your search requirements are and what sort of database they are using (pay close attention to whether or not it provides full text search ability). Beyond that, and somewhat obviously, you're also gonna want SSL on the website and to make sure you're up to date on federal and state privacy requirements for data like this, as well as best practices for securely transferring data over the web (port configuration, ssh keys, etc). The privacy concerns would raise a flag for me. If those data have anything personally identifiable in them - which they very probably do - then you're really gonna want to make sure you do your research on security of personally identifiable information. Government specific privacy /security /auditability requirements may also apply, so double check that too.

Hone decor / furniture industry is one of the highest profit promising industry today. The profit margins on home decor ranges from 20% - 45% depend on the price of the product. If you're looking to get quickly popular, I suggest you start with the online store and promote it on offline as well. Keep the margins low initially so that you can attract more buyers. As the business grows, reinvest the amount back on the business so that you can stock more varieties. All the very best.